Backyard Notes - January

Heavy with cold and snow

Backyard notes is a monthly feature of A Note From Melissa. It explores the changing landscape of the outside world and our inner lives as we move through the year. I hope it encourages you to look in your own backyard for changes and patterns.

It’s been a cold month, barely a day over freezing. The snow has piled, layer after layer, from one small snowfall to the next. Last week’s storm left at least 18 inches, if not more, on top of what was already there which is a lot for our area north of New York City. Shoveling felt like a true dig toward the earth and we’re left with walls of snow along walkways and steps and driveways.

We made a neat little path through the backyard for our dog, Sadie, and she looks longingly over all the humps of snow, which make a kind of barrier to the rest of her world. She’s much too dainty (if you could call a 65 pound pit-lab mix dainty) to go beyond it.

The hawks have been swooping low to the road to nab their prey and I’ve been watching the cardinals at the feeder, so red against all that white. The other birds blend into the brown bark of the trees, but the cardinals stand out, always.

I’ve been trying to notice the color of the sky a bit more. We rarely get those bluebird days in January. When they do come, they’re more milky. A soft pastel blue.

To look outside, to watch the snow come down, to see all those sparkling snow drifts covering the earth, you’d think January was quiet and peaceful. But, like so many, I’ve felt a fervent insistence within me. A warning. There is so much banging at the walls of my heart.

Like many of us, my heart has been with Minnesota this month. Watching them move through their resistance in their sub-zero temperatures, I’ve been inspired with how ordinary citizens are rising up against the masked men that have, quite literally, taken over Minneapolis (there are three times as many ICE agents there than there are police officers.) The good people of Minnesota are truly a model for us all.

It’s clear to me that we’ve reached an impasse in America. (We reached it a long time ago, but, well, we keep reaching another one and another one and another one after that.) When the federal government sends armed, masked agents to ask you to turn over your neighbors or else. When they beat immigrants and drag them into unmarked vehicles to detain them for the crime of existing. When they detain children and use five year olds as bargaining chips. When they brazenly shoot people in the face and flat out kill them for trying to protect their community members. Well. It feels pretty serious.

When I see people I know, people I call family and friends, people I’ve celebrated with at weddings and baptisms and birthdays, cried with at funerals, laughed with over baked ziti and my mother’s anisette cookies, when I see them post on social media that law enforcement has the right to do as they please with “criminals” and especially to anyone who “resists” them…well.

Well.

This month, I’ve opened the document of my work in progress and stared long and hard at tens of thousands of words, wondering if the years of writing will ever be worth anything. Then I’ve minimized the document back to the bottom of my screen. I’ve scanned job boards for part-time work, stacked links to listings, one after the other, and withered inside thinking of what I would have to give of myself to apply and be inevitably ignored.

I’ve made calls to my senators and watched my voice disappear into voice inboxes I never know if anyone listens to. I’ve gathered on signal groups and felt that everything and everyone are moving too slow for the speed of this moment. I’ve walked with a friend, carrying flyers, tucking the flyers in doorhandles, slipping them beneath the screens, flyers that ask the people inside those homes to do something about ICE. Then I’ve looked at all the houses I could not get to and wondered what actions really matter and which ones don’t.

Some great things have happened. Another session of my short story group at the Croton Free Library began. My daughter played Aura Lee at her piano recital. My father will soon move to be closer to us. I went on an overnight trip skiing with friends, the mountain so uncrowded, it felt like we were the only ones on the top of Mount Snow at sunset.

But it’s been a heavy month. I know you feel it too. Heavy with cold. Heavy with snow. Heavy with that insistent thrum that things are not right. Things are not just. Things are really not all that good.

Bear witness. Do what you can. Be that one bright thing. That one red cardinal that stands out against the snow. I hope it makes a difference. I think, maybe, in the end, it will.

Purchase my books here and here.

Browse my website.